K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

It might be giant

I was having some issues with the omnipresent Ubuntu setup guide, since I shifted it to a page on this blog a couple of months ago. I had it set up as a series of nested pages, and while that appealed to my manic-organizer tendencies, WordPress.com’s actual system for managing those pages is terribly inconvenient.

And the inconvenience is encumbered by the sheer weight of the blog management backend, something I’ve mentioned before, but for slightly different reasons.

So rather than wade through 44 different pages and manually update each one every time an addition or deletion is made (and no, WordPress.com will not allow me to use any sort of code that would make this easier), I decided to glom it all together on one giant page.

Which means if you’re a dial-up user or living on a part of the planet with perennially slow Internet access, you’re going to notice a difference in the time it takes to load the page. But once it’s in place, navigation between “sections” is via HTML anchors, so there’s no reloading required. That should make you happy.

And it’s quicker to find the stuff you want now too. I went there looking for a tweak a week or two ago and had to wait for WordPress.com to serve up three pages before I could find it. That’s not the way I liked it, but this new way requires only one page.

And it will make it easier to manage too, since there’s now only one “table of contents” that needs corrected, instead of 44.😯 That means yours truly can breathe a little easier too.😉

Long pages do have some advantages – once they’ve loaded up, apart from the very quick jumping between sections you mentioned it’s also much easier to do a search. The browser’s built-in “find” will do it. Easy to save a single page locally for offline reference too.